(And like with many of these things, holding senior executives personally liable helps ensure that the fines or whatever are not just waved away as a cost of doing business.)
The brewery, the bar nor the bar ever made me drink. I chose to drink. I also was the one that chose to stop drinking. BTW drink is as dangerous or more dangerous as many illegal drugs IMO.
> Making tech companies answerable for having developed algorithms that serve up hours of obvious brainrot content at a time would go a long way.
You get recommended what you already watch. Most of my YouTube feed is things like old guys repairing old cars, guys writing a JSON parse in haskell and stuff about how exploits work and some music. That is because that is what I already watched on the platform.
The argument I’m making is that it’s not beyond the pale for YouTube to detect “hey it’s been over an hour of ai bullshit / political rage bait / thirst traps / whatever, the algorithm is going to intentionally steer you in a different direction for the next little bit.”
What YouTube recommends to you is more of what you already watch. Removing stuff the you describe is as easy as clicking "Not interested" or "Do not recommend channel".
Also YouTube algorithm is rewarding watch time these days. So click bait isn't rewarded on platform as much. I actually watch a comedy show where they ridicule many of the click-baiters and they are all complaining about the ad-revenue and reach decreasing.
Also a lot of the political rage-bait is kinda going away. People are growing out of it. YouTube kinda has "metas" where a particular type of content will be super popular for a while and then go away.
I don't go down the political rage bait video pipeline, nevertheless next to any unrelated YouTube video I see all sorts of click/rage-bait littered in the sidebar just asking to start me down a rabbit hole.
As an example I opened a math channel/video in a private mode tab. Under it (mobile), alongside the expected math-adjacent recommendations I see things about socialist housing plans, 2025 gold rush debasement trades, the 7-stage empire collapse pattern ("the US is at stage 5"), and so on. So about 10% are unrelated political rage-bait.
Moreover, everyone is seeing different things for different reasons, even geographically. For example I recently discovered this: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-d.... If you look at exhibit 8A, section 3.5 (https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1366201/dl) you'll see various targeting, e.g. particularly swing states/counties.
And in the even worse cases they don’t even get up to go to the bathroom anymore. They just let it all loose.
Youtube and big tech will have to answer for this eventually.
I've resolved to accepting the fact that most people are just content with any form of brain rot because the alternatives are too mentally taxing. Technology has just enabled brain rot to distill into its current form, but the demand has always been there.
We were not built with the capacity to handle the sheer amount of stimulation the modern world has. You have to put in a lot of effort to not succumb to natural desires that would have been adaptive behaviours until recent history.
If no one ever did, why would YouTube be different ?
Go watch an episode of 25 Words or Less on your local broadcast station and watch how much slop is peddled on the show between the colorful noises (dear God those horns in the jingles are pure torture). They've fully tied in slop mobile games (some Solitaire game) into main gameplay advertising, they pull in horribly grainy live video from elderly "superfans" joining along from home, it's all just one giant slop machine before the evening news.
The richest, most powerful organizations are spending billions every month to make it more addictive, to reach more people.
Sugar, anyone?
I wouldn't say that we breath "too much".
Here in Singapore almost every restaurant and hawker is obsessed with jacking their food up with sugar. Worse though is that if they don't the local Singaporean "foodie" hitmen will annihilate the restaurant with poor reviews on Google Maps for being "bland".
So eating out is a no go. Cooking again unless you're obsessed with reading packaging or make everything from scratch yourself you're instantly adding more sugar than you know.
I have a suspicion that now fruits are also being engineered to be sweeter because apples are way way sweeter than I remember growing up and a lot of the oranges my mother in law buys for me also are blindingly sweet. And yet I feel there's a certain fragrance missing from these sweet fruits...
Japanese food is definitely healthier in many respects although there's still a lot of sugar hiding in sushi for example, and oyakodon, teriyaki and katsudon sauces are also often quite sweet.
Shabu shabu is better but so are most hotpots in a clear soup
Yes. But it's not by injecting sugar into fruits like many people think.
Farmers including the one next to my rural alt house:
- Take consultancy of agritech and selectively breed variants that are sweeter [0]
- Optimize min(fruits/tree-or-vine) to concentrate sugars in remaining fruits. [1]
- Ethylene-based post-pluck ripening to convert some starch to sugars and make it sweeter. [2]
- and more. Richer the farmer, the more sophisticated the techniques.
If you want truly fresh natural fruits, buy from a poor farmer directly and pay for logistics yourself. They have to be poor because well, they have to sell at market rate. Tragedy of the commons and all that. And logistics chains depend on fruits being fairly resilient. The logistics loss for natural fruits is 30-50% depending on the fruit. So yeah you need to pay 3x as well.
[1] this technique leads to lesser minerals, polyphenols, vit c etc in fruits. "Crowding out".
[2] this technique leads to less fiber formation since there's no time for polysacs to form. Major reason for fiber deficiency today according to agtech person I know is that people are eating fruits the same way their grandparents did, but whoops, you don't get enough anymore.
[0] They are bred to naturally do the above two things. Mostly, they are bred to autocatalyctically generate ethylene earlier.
If your country is in the business of exporting fruits, then the farmer has to compete with the whole world, and the tragedy of the commons mentioned above goes global. So every effect mentioned above multiplies 2-3x. Because it has to be even more logistics friendly, supply has to be really uniform due to expensive GTM, etc,.
Portion size, saturated fat, excessive salt, sugar, sometimes alcohol, low fiber— the industry has defined itself as an extension of the junk food industry. Which is ironic! Because pretty much the only food I would be willing to pay a premium for would be healthy food, demonstrably healthy food.
* The worst addictions, i.e. all the ones really worthy of the name, punish you (or kill you) if you stop.
We're not addicted to sugar, the "sugar cravings" are mostly to combos of carbs and fats.
Eating enough turns off my "sugar cravings". Eating lots of protein makes any craving for sugar disappear (I survived last Christmas by not eating any cakes, just lots of meat).
Grab a fistful of whatever candy you're thinking about when you say that and put it in your mouth. Then once you've done that, try doing the same with pure sugar. Tell me if you think you got different amounts of sugar in your mouth or not.
It's not the first time I hear this soundbite, and while it perhaps sounds cool as a TikTok comment, it really doesn't make much sense in reality.
Then I did something like "3 pieces weigh 18g with ~11g total sugars and 17g total carbs so about 61% sugars"
So what is the difference, exactly? Depends on what’s in the other 40%, right? It would be a bigger difference if the other 40% was made of fats or proteins or fiber, but in the case of Jolly Ranchers and many other candies, the other 40% of calories is cornstarch, which isn’t sugar but is made of glucose chains and breaks down into sugar when digested. Cornstarch, like sugar, is 100% carbohydrate. https://www.soupersage.com/compare-nutrition/cornstarch-vs-w...
@saagarjha didn’t claim candies are pure sugar, they said it’s surprising how close they are to pure sugar. And 60% sugar + 40% flavorless cornstarch + flavoring and food coloring is close to pure sugar with food coloring. Close is a relative term, so when arguing about it, it’d be helpful to provide a baseline or examples or definitions. Jolly Ranchers are much closer to pure sugar than meat or broccoli is. Jolly Ranchers are much closer to pure sugar than even a banana, which is also 100% carbohydrate calories. I don’t know how to argue that Jolly Ranchers aren’t close to pure sugar. Maybe you can give an example?
BTW, the current product website says Jolly Ranchers are 72% sugar: https://www.hersheyland.com/products/jolly-rancher-original-...
I've been told to use an offhand rule of fiber vs sugar as a ratio. For every 1 gram of fiber 'up to' 50 of carbs ~ calories, with lower better.
Fiber also has other benefits https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/healthy-eating/fiber-helps-diab...
(plus some other quick search results)
https://www.calculatorultra.com/en/tool/carbohydrate-to-fibe...
https://www.everydayhealth.com/diabetes/the-ratio-of-fats-ca...
Take pure sugar, add to hot water to make a thick syrup, add food colouring, cook at two hundred and something degrees. Hard candy.
Most other candy recipes are similar, and over 50% sugar by weight. Sugar is the main ingredient by weight after water of many drinks.
You're being deliberately obtuse if you continue to insist on comparing a bag of sugar to something made mostly of sugar. It's like saying "You like steak? Ok, go lick that cow then tell me you like steak!" - it's a straw man argument.
Glad it works for you, but that's not universal. I'm pretty much addicted to sugar, regardless of what else I eat. So I have to not buy it in the first place - that way it's just not available.
Yeah we know sugar is bad. The article's about screens. It's not really important whether sugar addiction or screen addiction is bigger. This isn't worth fighting over.
They can both be bad and you can post an article about sugar for talking about sugar.
There's just something about having a beautiful OLED screen, the tablet-like shape, touch interface, and access to all of human knowledge/news/entertainment. I remember when people used to have a tv on when they lounged around the house, or cooked, or cleaned. My parents even had a little special splash proof CRT TV in the kitchen.
The modern screens are just that, except also much more convenient and with million times more content, and personalized, and wireless ANC headphones if you like. This is it, this is peak human information environment. It's not a conspiracy of corporations.
Much like obesity is primarily driven by abundance of calories, another fight we won with our natural environment. The highly processed foods and marketing are just barely making a dent at the edge, and are largely a zero-sum game between food manufacturers.
I’ve had success consciously worsening my experience, doing stuff like reducing color intensity with accessibility options or using the web version of an app for added friction, which is ridiculous but here we are.
Reducing color intensity is a great idea to worsen the experience, I’ll give it a go. Yet first thing I do after wake up is checking Hacker News and the design is probably not at fault. Still some self improvement to do.
0 still security updated! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45270108
I know some people have gone back to carrying a digital pocket camera, but I haven’t really bought into the idea for convenience and because I think taking it out has different social implications.
It definitely does, but in my experience a standalone camera is usually better received than a phone.
I think it’s got to do with the implication of easy shareability. Pointing a phone at someone always brings to mind the idea that the photo can be sent anywhere within seconds. Are they going to post you on their instagram story? Are they going to send it to their friends and laugh about you?
The friction to sharing photos is so much higher with a standalone camera that I think a lot of people feel much more comfortable with one pointed at them.
Then again, that same friction quickly becomes a problem for the user - I know I’ve lost a lot of my photos just because I couldn’t be bothered to connect the camera, transfer the photos, organize them, back them up etc.
Selfies or phone pictures are quick and people mostly don’t react, but cameras make us pose, subconsciously. At least I feel a phone gets me more natural photos, that work better as memories of the moment.
The lack of instant online backup is also a good point, I don’t know if that’s on the table on newer models.
But not only that, also my work iPhone got recently upgraded from an old SE with small screen and laggy performance to the new 16e, and I found myself more eager to check work emails, ms teams than ever before.
I don’t think that’s a good development, but at the end it’s my responsibility and my own decision on how I use those devices. That also means I will probably downgrade to a worse iPhone instead of getting the best available.
It's hard to believe but initially the content was much thoughful, with actual cultural gems produced for it. Then that content got pushed further and further late at night and eventually disapeared. We can categorize that trend as some kind of "natural erosion" but that'd be ignoring the various forces that fought to change that medium, one of which may be lazy humans relinquishing their soul to the beautiful screen, but another sure one is profit seeking through selling advertisement.
Also, I remember a time when bringing a handheld video game at school would be terrible for a kid's social status. Now it's socially acceptable to spend time in video games.
I don't remember that time. Even the "jocks" loved Mattel Football. And what else were they going to do in school, pay attention to the teacher? ;-)
That's it in a nutshell, I think. We had television at home since I was maybe 10 years old but the content that would interest a kid was very neatly time-slotted to small segments of each day (with Sunday being essentially an entertainment desert to a kid).
So TV was boring most of the day so we went outside, or if Winter, found ways to amuse ourselves indoors. I drew pictures, played board games with my sister, wired up a circuit with my 65-in-1 electronics kit…
And I just checked their site, and what do you know... https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkfun-inventors-kit-for-micropyt...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-rise-and-f...
"... Sodium cyanide can dissolve gold in water, but it is also a deadly poison. “Atomic” chemistry sets of the 1950s included radioactive uranium ore. Glassblowing kits, which taught a skill still important in today’s chemistry labs, came with a blowtorch."
Whatever it was that made humans enjoy books, newspapers, magazines, movies, tv shows, written correspondence, phone calls, etc, is now available times a million, 24/7, in your pocket, essentially free (if you don’t count externalities ofc). Plus the ability to handle a huge number of admin and business tasks from anywhere. Not hard to see why it’s so addictive for almost everyone.
Who is getting obese from fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains, and the like?
People will eat a whole bag of salted potato chips or a whole container of ice cream in a sitting, but who eats a whole bag of oranges in a sitting?
I suppose that for any given action, there's likely always someone who will do it, but in any case a bag of oranges has significantly different nutritional properties than a bag of chips. How many oranges are we talking about, and what size oranges?
Something we could not have imagined a few decades ago.
If you can’t install it because you’re using chrome, switch to a real browser :)
But yeah it's kind of delusional to put a blanket ban on code you could read yourself.
uBlock origin is 307k lines of code. Yes, you could read it all, but its an impractical task.
Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting uBO is untrustworthy, but just because a piece of software is open source doesn't mean it is practical for an individual to audit the code themselves.
"Screen addiction is an apocalypse"
"Screen addiction is a genocide"
...
No, that's not possible. Your comment will be seen by a tiny minority of people on the internet and is a drop in the ocean. The impulse to persuade social change works in small groups, and the frustration you're feeling is completely feckless on the internet. (ie, if you were saying "can we stop [thing] in a small workplace you might actually have success. Out here on the internet this is really impossible, and is a mismatch between our intuitions and reality.)
Homebound and housewives used to watch hours of game shows and soap operas all day.
If a kid liked to read, some parents would tell them to "get your head out of that book and go outside."
It's just something to do to fill the boredom.
Old people can‘t be left alone with internet devices and online banking.
I wonder if I will ever become that dumb too when I am old…
It's not very nice to call that "being dumb". Imagine that you live for 60 years in a country speaking English, and in a matter of a couple years, most of society switches to Mandarin. You may well struggle learning Mandarin as a 60 years old, and you wouldn't like being called "dumb" by young people who grow up with it.
First, older generation having lower IQ than newer is neither the Flynn effect nor its reversal. The Flynn effect compares historical test results to current ones; not old people vs young people but old people when they passed the test long ago with young people passing the test now. If elderly people are loosing IQ points it's most certainly because of age not because they have had a lower IQ all along.
And the reversal of the Flynn effect states that younger people are actually the one having the lower hand on this comparison.
The ones I know who fall for this stuff the most have always been gullible. They were getting taken by cell phone tower investment scams and anti-vac hoaxes decades ago and the only real change is the medium.
It's an ugly addiction that mirrors what we've seen with alcoholics and schizophrenics, whereby they point a finger at anything but the actual problem, and any remedy that the have, or are given, they adamantly avoid and refuse.
YouTube, like other social media, is driven by pushing and pulling on the right emotions in the right way to get you hooked. Sexy, funny, happy, cute, sensational, sad, scary, angry. Enough Sophia Vergara, cat videos, UFOs, doom and gloom, bias-confirming politics, etc, and you'll have someone watching all day long. It's not like what it was when an elderly person watched daytime soap operas and gameshows, this is a dopamine-fueled additive binge. We've seen several really bad cases where it's almost everything that the lonely elderly person does. There's no more "journey" or "investment" when you can simply flick to the next video that tickles your fancy in that moment.
These are the people I'm sincerely concerned about, and they have zero reason to go seek help. It's not an issue to them. In fact, they'll fight tooth and nail to claim anything else is their problem except this.
It's almost as though the first generations to enjoy television weren't ready for something this addictive.
Personally, I despise YouTube, despite growing up in the heart of the Silicon Valley. That platform serves a handful of purposes for me, such as helpful tutorials the rare time that I need them and epic Mongolian folk metal music videos.
Not that they have any more morals or self control, they just seem to have a comparatively awful algorithm that brings up the same 14 videos over and over.
There is real gold on youtube, like for example the math explainers by 3blue1brown. But if you ever tries opening a private browser window and opening and see the video recommendations it looks like a platform only containing mindless trash, with the mental nutritents contained in a piece of cardboard.
And there are people who like precisely that: Mindnumbing somethings that just keep your brain from having a single thought.
Using YouTube (or any video thing) for programming topics drives me nuts, the presenter never goes at my pace.
The stuff that you mention. You can literally say "Not Interested" on the video and it will show you less of content. I see none of it.
And if you click on one, by mistake or curiosity, now you've sent a signal that you like it and will get much more of it in the next batch of recommendations.
"Oh you didn't skip this video on a topic you usually don't watch? How about we make that topic 50% of your next however many videos?!"
I go out of my way to block accounts that post stuff I don't want in my feed and pretty much all of them see that as an invitation to give me more of the same content. Likely because I "interact" longer with the content since it takes clicks to block the account.
I actually ended up disabling watch history all together and I’ve installed an extension (Unhook) that hides the sidebar recommendations, Shorts, and other useless features.
That doesn't happen. Firstly you literally click on the video and say "don't recommend channel" and you will never see a JRE episode again.
Also, just by how you phrased that whole paragraph. I don't believe you are telling the truth.
None of those characters are "alt-right". "alt-right" essentially means White Nationalist.
You cannot tell me that Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are White Nationalists because of their support for Israel and one of them is Jewish. White nationalists really don't like Israel and Jewish people. They however were labelled as "alt right" to smear them, by other political commentators and publications who are typically on the left and American.
You would only use that framing if you were listening to those commentators and/or publications that used similar phrasing.
Also Jordan Peterson actually talked about addiction on a Joe Rogan podcast and it was one of the things that put me on the road to dealing with my drinking issues. I stopped listening to Joe Rogan about episode 1000 after they stopped being live and were prerecorded.
I have plenty of criticisms of them now. But I Jordan Peterson did help me at least indirectly. I don't watch either of them anymore and haven't watched them for quite a number of years at this point.
I don't see that at all. I use YouTube most evenings (I watch YouTube instead of TV).
I do have like traditional news media sometimes on the third or fourth row and you can dismiss that quickly.
> And if you click on one, by mistake or curiosity, now you've sent a signal that you like it and will get much more of it in the next batch of recommendations.
You fix that by simply pressing "Not Interested" a few times. It can be annoying. It isn't the end of the world.
I can't get it to stop recommending a video I've already watched...it thinks I want to watch it again I guess.
Now you get baited with Member Only videos too. I'm already paying you $30 a month...
I don't think that is the case. If I click Not Interested. Similar video don't show.
> Now you get baited with Member Only videos too. I'm already paying you $30 a month..
To members? Or to YouTube to remove ads? If it is the former, you have shown YouTube that you are willing to pay for memberships, so they going to recommend them.
Can't look up a movie or a gadget without getting a thumbnail with big red letters saying that the thing sucks, this despite me avoiding review/reaction content like the plague.
They basically wouldn't travel to anywhere quality, high speed internet isn't present.
Would it be better if she sat at home with the TV on and a paper book? No, I don't think so.
This is also where the leisure time went. Keynes predicted 15 hour workweek, we decided to just have kids and the elderly not work at all.
Amazing analysis.
What are you referring to by fewer alternatives? Isn't there way more ways / activities / infrastructure to spend your time these days than before?
My grandparents who lived in a city could walk down the street, get groceries, and easily meet friends for a snack or chat. Even when they were alone, they were part of a community. My parents' generation all live far away from each other, struggle to get out of the house, and are scared of strangers.
Twitter is also the best news app. You get the info, trend, and critical commentary (with people you follow boosted for you in the comments) all in one go.
I'm confident TV off and book is better than youtube, for the purpose of maintaining and agile mind.
(Yes, I'm aware that they push whatever the users click onto and whatever makes them profit; I don't care, I still believe they should push the best content).
I think overall, the internet is taking up more of their time than books/tv did in the past (just as it does for me), but it also gives them access to quality content within their niche interests.
Fiction books are full of outright lies =)
But even nonfiction books tend to fail fact-checks: https://reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/cwa4uv/how_acc...
Sapiens is a good example of that kind of mass market crap. I’m currently reading After the Ice by Mithen and The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow which are much better attempts at pop-academia takes at early human history. Even just the notes section of those books is a goldmine for sources that you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else outside a dense textbook.
Now with AI it’s easier than ever to stick to the good (nonfiction) stuff. Ask it for book recommendations and then ask it to search online for criticisms/reviews of their accuracy. I used to double check the sources for the reviews but never found any broad strokes inaccuracies.
Wow. Everyone always had kids. Capitalism is why you have no time at all to live AND why you that's your fault.
I'm done with HN for the day.
Hopefully full dive VR will be ready by the time I'm that old.
Many older people I work with would love to have more required interactions move away from the phone screen.
This was actually a big issue in my office leading to work from home being rolled back. The boomers want to be in the office so other people are forced to socialize with them, and they don’t want to be home because many of them seem to resent their spouses.
IMO it’s a terrible trade-off. What they lack is true relationships and friendships, and they're filling the void with idle workplace chitchat for the illusion of connection. I’d rather be at home. I’m getting paid to work, not provide social support for lonely boomers.
What if technology is just evolving us into something else? I can imagine in 1000 years from now our cyborg versions would be walking around with screens inside their brains not thinking twice about it.
I don’t think I’d like that world at all. And I hate what screens have done to my current world. But shit, maybe there’s no stopping it.
—N. Molesworth (1956)
Grab a bodhran or banjo and head to a local folk jam everyone!
> Alarming and misleading news may be a particular threat to the elderly, who are twice as likely as under-25s to use news apps or websites.
Millions of people are addicted to watching Fox News paint a picture of the urban US as a war zone that rural and suburban residents should avoid at all costs. That doesn't even include the right wing AI slop on social media sending similar messages. One could argue that this is affecting Trump himself, whereby domestic policy is shaped around what he sees on TV and social media (where was he seeing videos of "bombed out" Portland, anyway?).
young folks on social media create a lot content (posts/photos/videos) meant for their peer group to consume, so their feed is a mix of authentic peer-generated content and whatever mass-produced stuff sneaks into their feed.
older folks do not share nearly as much. maybe a text-based facebook comment once in a while. so when they log and consume from their feed, they aren't watching things created by their peers -- they're seeing content that professionals created for the purpose of broadcast.
A quote from an author I like, Matthew Crawford: "Attention is the thing that is most one’s own: in the normal course of things, we choose what to pay attention to, and in a very real sense this determines what is real for us; what is actually present to our consciousness. Appropriations of our attention are then an especially intimate matter."
I can't really envision a solution, frankly. On a personal level, I have tried dozens of strategies to use my phone less, including deleting many of my social media accounts, and regrettably, its still an issue. My best guess is legislation that bans machine-learning algorithms on newsfeeds. But there are billions of dollars and a dysfunctional government (speaking U.S. here) motivated against that outcome.
I’ve never scrolled hours away on HN.
I made a rule for myself that I would never go past page 2 of HN. So, each morning, I see 60 items, and if none of them interest me, then I just move on with my day. I think that's why I never became addicted.
What they do in their free time is their business, but it often even messes with human interaction. I've been midsentence with them in person when they'd just pull out their iPad for a quick scroll, completely oblivious that I was even there or talking to them. What's weird is that it almost reminds me of a person taking a quick vape or smoke... I'm not even sure they realize why they're doing it.
So I would better prefer them playing three-in-row. I think after some time it even would be possible easier to "sell" to them playing some kind of minecraft with grandchildren.
Also, I vividly remember parks in Georgia (country!) crowded with elderly loudly playing chess and domino, instead of watching "who deserved to die by our god-chosen almighty army today" crap.
singingwolfboy•8h ago